Character Design & Development

This level is for artists who can draw a figure but have never designed one to serve a purpose. Drawing a person and designing a character are different activities: the first asks whether the anatomy is right, the second asks whether the viewer understands who this is within a second of seeing them. The level introduces design as a process of generating options and choosing between them, rather than drawing the first idea that arrives and refining it until time runs out.

By the end of this level you can turn a short written description into a sheet of distinct rough options rather than one idea repeated with small variations. You can assess those options against the brief instead of against personal preference, identify which one is strongest, and take it through to a single clean drawing that communicates the character clearly. You will also have started the habit that underpins all design work: generating widely before committing narrowly.

This level addresses the most common failure in character design: a figure that looks convincing in the single drawing it was designed in and falls apart the moment it is drawn from another angle, in another pose, or by another person. A design is not finished when it looks good once; it is finished when it can be reproduced. The level moves from drawing a character to specifying one, which is a different and considerably more demanding discipline.

By the end of this level you can deliver a character that stays recognisably itself across angles, poses and expressions, which is the point at which a design becomes usable rather than merely attractive. You can explain why each decision was made, in terms of the brief and of how the character will be drawn in practice. You will also be able to look at someone else's design and predict where it will break, which is the same skill applied outward.

This level moves from designing a character to designing a cast, which introduces a problem single-character work never raises: every figure now has to be distinguishable from every other figure, at a glance and often in poor viewing conditions. Individually excellent designs can still fail as a group if they share a silhouette, a colour range or a shape vocabulary. The work here is as much about the relationships between designs as about the designs themselves.

By the end of this level you can design a full cast whose members are told apart instantly in silhouette, and you can document each one clearly enough that another artist can draw them correctly without asking you a single question. You can also identify, in an existing set of designs, which two are too close to each other and what to change in order to separate them. This is the point at which your work becomes useful on a project with other people on it.

This level is concerned with character design as characterisation rather than decoration. A design can satisfy every requirement, read cleanly in silhouette and still say nothing about the person it depicts. The question at this stage is what a design means: what the viewer concludes about someone before a single line of dialogue, and whether those conclusions are the ones you intended. It is the point at which design stops being a craft problem and becomes an authorial one.

By the end of this level you can take an abstract idea about a person and express it in form, colour and costume, producing designs that feel inevitable rather than assembled. You can work against expectation deliberately and still be understood, and you can articulate the reasoning behind a design clearly enough to direct other people working to it. Your designs carry meaning that survives being redrawn by someone else, which is the most demanding test a character design faces.